WHEN popular actress Mira Filzah put on a traditional Indian costume for a photoshoot, she would never have guessed that she would be the subject of a heated debate about cultural appropriation.
Those two words have become a catchphrase these days, one used for all sorts of things, rightly and wrongly. The debate has been going on for quite some time now and shows no sign of abating.
There are those who say that using things belonging to another culture, be they clothes, dances, music or something more deeply rooted, is cultural appropriation.
Others say it merely shows appreciation of another culture. For now, the accepted definitions are that cultural appreciation is when someone seeks to understand and learn about another culture to broaden perspectives and connect with others cross-culturally, while appropriation is simply taking one aspect of a culture that is not one's own and using it for his own personal interest. Those are the general definitions.
But, things are not as easily defined as that. They are too broad to be accurate in every scenario. Take Malaysia, for instance. In our multi-racial, multi-cultural and multi-religious country, what others may call appropriation is, more often than not, simply cultural appreciation.
We have a healthy respect for our countrymen of differing races and religions, and we embrace our differences as well as our multicultural existence. In fact, our "multicultural-ness" is something that should unite, not divide. A simple example — weddings. How many of us have attended wedding ceremonies of different cultures?
When one goes to a Hindu wedding, he or she would probably wear the Indian traditional costume, the dhoti or kurta for men, and sari for women. For the Malay wedding, one would wear the baju Melayu, or a cheongsam to a Chinese wedding, whether Buddhist, Taoist or Christian.
According to the accepted definition, this is cultural appropriation because it is for personal gain. But what this actually does, in Malaysia at least, is unite us even more. To us, seeing someone of a different culture wearing clothes from our culture is an ode of sorts.
The cultural appropriation/appreciation debate has been taken too far. Wearing the clothes of someone else's culture should be viewed in the same way as eating food from a different culture.
A Chinese man is allowed to have as his favourite cuisine Indian food, just as a Malay woman could have Eurasian, Iban or Kadazan food as her favourite. So, why not clothes or some other cultural item?
In just a few days, we celebrate our 63rd National Day. It may not be such a big deal for those of us from Sabah and Sarawak, but they do celebrate along with those of us in the peninsula.
And in a little over two weeks after that, we celebrate Malaysia Day. Now that is a day that means a lot to all of us, or at least it should. These are the times when, even more so than in other times, we should be celebrating and appreciating our cultural differences.
Malaysia — and Malaya before that — has long been known as a melting pot of different cultures. We need to keep it that way and ensure decidedly Western notions of "appropriation" are not accepted here.